CDMX.- Yasmín Esquivel, Minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), plagiarized the thesis with which she obtained her doctorate in Law from the Anahuac University in 2009, according to an investigation by El País.
According to the Spanish newspaper, 209 of the 456 pages of Esquivel’s thesis “Fundamental rights in the Mexican legal system and their defense” correspond to works previously published by 12 other authors.
Among those kidnapped would be a former Rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); a former Spanish Minister of Culture and a former president of the Supreme Court of Spain; a former president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), as well as Mexican, Italian, Spanish and German jurists.
Two of these authors have already confirmed the plagiarism to El País.
The Iberian newspaper adds that two Mexican academics, who blindly reviewed the tests, without knowing that they corresponded to a work by the Minister, also considered that it was plagiarism.
“In the case of my chapter, I have recognized it immediately, it is a textual, literal reproduction, of pages and pages. She does not put quotation marks, therefore it is a book plagiarism, what she has done is a cut and paste. It is It is evident that what he has done is copy directly. I have seen it right away. It is not a subtle matter. He has done it in a very crude way,” José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, Minister of Culture and Sports of the Government of Spain in Spain, told El País. 2020 to 2021 and currently Ambassador to UNESCO.
Esquivel took, without citing, the text by Rodríguez Uribes “Rousseau and human rights”, published in Historia de los derechos fundamentales (Dykinson, 1998).
In addition, El País also reports, the jurist and researcher Miguel Carbonell has confirmed that Minister Esquivel also copied several pages from her book “Fundamental Rights in Mexico” (UNAM, 2004), for which she prepared 15 years and whose writing she dedicated three.
“It is plagiarism. If we understand plagiarism to publish with your name a text that you did not write in an original way, it is plagiarism. There is no other way to define it. And there is a use of both the main text, which involved an effort that I made when writing it, as from the sources that I reviewed to feed my own text. It seems to me a double plagiarism, due to the use of sources that were not reviewed personally and that correspond to the effort of others, an effort that involved me time, review bibliographical collections from other countries, money to make copies of the articles, and that someone arrives and takes advantage of this, it seems to me that there is no other way to qualify it,” Carbonell told the Spanish newspaper.
According to the analysis, discounting the title, index, acknowledgments and bibliography, plagiarism is equivalent to 46.5% of the pages written in Esquivel’s thesis.
Minister Esquivel was a magistrate in the Superior Agrarian Court at the time she delivered her doctoral thesis, in 2008.
According to El País, between December of that year and January 2009, he obtained the approval vote of seven synods -all of them academics from the Anahuac University- who, as can be seen in the arguments for their vote, recognized the originality of the work and its contributions to the field of law.
Esquivel received her postgraduate degree in June 2009, and in December the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) issued her her professional doctor’s license.
Esquivel obtained a Law Degree with a thesis registered in 1987 at the FES Aragón, which is identical to another published a year earlier, in 1986, by Edgar Ulises Báez Gutiérrez at the Faculty of Law.
Just this Thursday, a federal court overturned the prohibition that had been imposed on UNAM to report on the procedure initiated against Esquivel for the alleged plagiarism of his degree thesis, deeming that the right to information should prevail. However, although it authorizes to continue with the instruction of said procedure, the court ratified the provisional suspension that prevents the Ethics Committee of the university from issuing its final resolution on the alleged plagiarism.
